ALICE (RICH) NORTHROP, 1864-1922

The daughter of Mary (Althouse) Rich and Franklin Rich, Alice Bell (Rich) Northrop was born in New York City on March 6, 1864. She had two brothers and a sister, all younger than she; all three had died by the time ARN was thirty-four. She attended New York public schools and Hunter College, and then taught briefly in the New York City school system.

ARN's diaries begin just before her nineteenth birthday and indicate an early and intense interest in nature studies. In 1889, at the age of twenty-five, she married John Isiah Northrop, an instructor of botany and zoology at Columbia University. The couple commenced a series of wide-ranging field trips, but in 1891, almost exactly two years after their marriage, Dr. Northrop was killed in a laboratory explosion at the Columbia School of Mines. ARN's only child, John Howard Northrop (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1946), was born eight days after his father's death. ARN suffered a long and severe illness after the near-simultaneous loss of her husband and birth of her son, but then began to rebuild her life. She was by then instructor of botany at Hunter College, and continued to teach there throughout the period covered by these papers. She did not marry again, but raised her son alone, suspending her travels for several years while he was very young; when he was about six she resumed them, taking him with her.

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